Halloween Events 2009

The Masquerade held a Halloween costume party throughout all three of its venues on Oct. 30. A few hundred people showed up for the Halloween-style rave as some danced with light, some hung from silk and all were treated to the techno sounds of the live band.

(Photos by Dustin Chambers)

Big Boi's party was held at Stankonia in the Courvoisier Lounge.  It was a fundraiser for the rapper's charity, The Big Kidz Foundation.  Big Boi was dressed up as "Dick Fury", as in he wore his suit from the "The Way You Move" video.

(Photos by Dustin Chambers)

I was only looking for costume ideas...

(H/T to Gawker)

I also came across this tale of teen angst/recipe for Oh-No-She-Didn't Butternut Squash Soup from CosomGirl.com:

Lindsey was a shoo-in for head cheerleader. Her handsprings were Slinkies on speed; her pikes were 90 degrees of perfection; her dismounts put Nastia Liukin to shame. On top of that, while other cheerleaders...

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For sheer literary merit and respectability, Frankenstein has cast a shadow over all horror novels published over the two subsequent centuries. Picking Mary Shelley's 1818 classic seems like an easy out, though, which ignores more recent landmarks of the genre like Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House and Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes. The new century has...

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So far 13 Days of Halloween has beheld scary things (movie trailers, short stories, TV shows, songs, etc.) from a safe distance. Some of the spookiest, most creative visions of the year, however, might be on view right down the street from you at this very moment. The past couple of decades have seen Halloween lawn displays evolve from modest Jack-o-Lanterns to sprawling, grisly...

To be fair, I probably don't know enough scary radio shows to make an informed decision, and radio's a perfect medium for generating chills. While I'm sure there are many unsung classics, Orson Welles' broadcast of The War of the Worlds seems an inarguable choice, given that it generated actual hysteria in real life.

Exactly how many people thought Welles' news report-style adaptation of...

For all of you stressing out over a scary, last-minute costume, you can finally relax. Kim Zolciak of the Real Housewives of Atlanta has a Halloween costume kit based on her "fabulous," wine-guzzling life. I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot of Halloween Housewives at Pride this weekend...now that drag queen is scary!

While shivering over the scariest stage plays yesterday, I neglected to mention Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. The sung-through musical seems so sharply different from scary "straight" plays that it belongs in another category altogether.

The vast majority of pop tunes about monsters and murderers tend to be cool, not creepy, from...

image-1"TRUE! nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why WILL you say that I am mad?" Edgar Allen Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" hooks the reader from its first sentence and is a perennial contender for the most frightening short story ever written.

Unlike nearly all forms of fiction, however, the initial words aren't always the most crucial to scary short stories....

You know how in horror movies, the victims-to-be always open the forbidden doors, no matter how loudly you yell, "Don't go in there!" at the screen? Well, Culture Surfing can't resist counting down the days to Halloween with examples of the biggest scares in pop culture, across multiple media. Think of them as the razor-blade apples in your Trick-or-Treat bag.

Let's creak that door open...